Here's a short cheat sheet of how to get videos ready for blog posts. We convert them to the open format webm (mp4 is proprietary and will for example not work on Fedora out of the box), and create short and smaller video thumbnails. These thumbnails will be embedded into the blog post directly as little animated pictures, just like gifs, but much more space efficient.

Converting to webm

Shortening

Scaling down

Resize to 300x533 px:

$ ffmpeg -y -i video-short.webm -vf scale=300:533 video-thumb.webm

Embedding into a post

<videocontrolswidth="300"height="533"class="border"autoplay="autoplay"loopmute><sourcesrc="/static/video/2019-00/video-thumb.webm"/><ahref="/static/video/2019-00/video.webm">Description of the video here</a></video>

Make sure to embed the link to the full video somewhere in the text related to the video:

Some text talking about the video ([full video](/static/video/2019-00/video.webm)).